American Opinion: On Cheney and the CIA

It is all too easy to assume the worst about former Vice President Dick Cheney. His record of deception and manipulation makes it more than plausible that he improperly instructed intelligence officials to conceal from the appropriate congressional committees information about a secret Bush-era program to capture or kill terrorists.

Less clear is whether the law required this information to be shared. Under the National Se-curity Act of 1947 and its many amendments, the director of Central Intelligence "shall keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all covert actions which are the responsibility" of the government. The program described by intelligence sources -- creating paramilitary teams capable of pursuing al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- certainly would require congressional notification if it became operational, but the sketchy reports on it so far do not definitively answer the question of whether it had grown beyond internal discussions and evolved into "covert action," as anticipated by the act. ...

That sort of ambiguity -- a disputed issue of fact posed against an established statute -- demands investigation. ...